Who's Afraid of the Dark?
It seems that for as long as humans have been around, we have had a special fear for the things that lurk in the dark. Goblins, ghosts, vampires, evil spirits, these are the creatures who made the night their roaming grounds. It was not safe to walk outside at those times. In our fear, we thought up of tons of ways of giving ourselves protection. A crucifix and a wooden stake may defeat a vampire, sacrificing a ram will hold back an evil spirit, laying a body to proper rest will keep its spirit from becoming vengeful.
Mankind is on the whole easily swayed by superstitions and irrationality, and this has in many ways shaped our religions. My own religion was no different.
When I was a kid, I was told that there was a god. This god created me, loved me, and wanted to have a relationship with me. However, I was a bad person. I was a sinner, "born into iniquity". The problem here is that god is holy, and he can't allow evil people to be in his presence. Thus, all are condemned to a terrifying place called hell. Here all will be tortured for eternity, burning and screaming in pain. Now, whether or not I was given the "full" picture of hell as a child isn't something I fully remember. But I do know by the time I was a young teen, I really did understand this and heard of it pretty often.
Hell is real, or so I was told. So here's a question:
As a child, do you tend to take your parents' beliefs without questioning them?
For me, the answer was a definite yes. I was brought up in a culture and within communities that all believed in hell, and reinforced this idea in my brain. So, it was only natural that I believed it as well.
This scared the hell out of me.
With all this in mind, I quickly accepted Jesus as my savior, and all throughout my childhood and up into my adult years, I constantly begged for his forgiveness and dedicated my life to him.
But as I've mentioned in previous posts, I began doubting him. Was he real? Was he god? Did a god even exist? And this led me to question hell itself.
If I was going to be honest with myself, I didn't have any good reason to believe in hell. I had no evidence it existed, other than people just claiming it did. However, there was one thing that still held me back, and that was fear.
The best way to explain this fear is to give you a (very short) paraphrase of the philosophical argument that I had bought into, and that is Pascal's Wager (if you want a proper explanation of it, Google is a good friend). If god exists, then hell is real, and you need to believe in him in order to keep from going there. But if he doesn't exist, then it doesn't matter if you believe or don't. The long and short of it is that you better believe in god just in case he exists, because you run the risk of burning forever if you don't believe.*
I had everything on the line. If I died and it turned out god was real, then I better force myself to believe him now or I'm getting eternal punishment. Hell wasn't where I wanted to spend even a day, let alone an eternity.
So I tried. But belief isn't something you can fully manufacture like that, and so I still doubted it all. And so my fear of burning still lingered.
It was then that I came across the book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Of the many things I found there, this quote really hit me:
"There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception."
I didn't believe. And yet the coward in me was desperately trying to keep from a hell that I really didn't believe in, merely because it "might be possible".
What if every time I spill salt, I shake some of it over my left shoulder just to be safe? What if I avoid cracks in the sidewalk just in case I possibly break my mother's back? What if I make certain not to break a mirror because I might get sick, or get insanely frightened by black cats?
What if, what if, what if, what if...
What if I stopped being afraid of the dark?
Now, I have to say that I'm no longer afraid of hell. The arguments for it and the evidence I have been given do not warrant a belief in it. And I'm done living a lie, acting as if I am a Christian when I truly am not.
So with one sweep, I have done away with what I believed, and have stepped into a world that is far more beautiful, strange, and crazy than I could have comprehended when I was a Christian. I have stepped into a world without god, without religion, without any holy texts or divine messages.
When I was a kid, I was told that there was a god. This god created me, loved me, and wanted to have a relationship with me. However, I was a bad person. I was a sinner, "born into iniquity". The problem here is that god is holy, and he can't allow evil people to be in his presence. Thus, all are condemned to a terrifying place called hell. Here all will be tortured for eternity, burning and screaming in pain. Now, whether or not I was given the "full" picture of hell as a child isn't something I fully remember. But I do know by the time I was a young teen, I really did understand this and heard of it pretty often.
Hell is real, or so I was told. So here's a question:
As a child, do you tend to take your parents' beliefs without questioning them?
For me, the answer was a definite yes. I was brought up in a culture and within communities that all believed in hell, and reinforced this idea in my brain. So, it was only natural that I believed it as well.
This scared the hell out of me.
With all this in mind, I quickly accepted Jesus as my savior, and all throughout my childhood and up into my adult years, I constantly begged for his forgiveness and dedicated my life to him.
But as I've mentioned in previous posts, I began doubting him. Was he real? Was he god? Did a god even exist? And this led me to question hell itself.
If I was going to be honest with myself, I didn't have any good reason to believe in hell. I had no evidence it existed, other than people just claiming it did. However, there was one thing that still held me back, and that was fear.
The best way to explain this fear is to give you a (very short) paraphrase of the philosophical argument that I had bought into, and that is Pascal's Wager (if you want a proper explanation of it, Google is a good friend). If god exists, then hell is real, and you need to believe in him in order to keep from going there. But if he doesn't exist, then it doesn't matter if you believe or don't. The long and short of it is that you better believe in god just in case he exists, because you run the risk of burning forever if you don't believe.*
I had everything on the line. If I died and it turned out god was real, then I better force myself to believe him now or I'm getting eternal punishment. Hell wasn't where I wanted to spend even a day, let alone an eternity.
So I tried. But belief isn't something you can fully manufacture like that, and so I still doubted it all. And so my fear of burning still lingered.
It was then that I came across the book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Of the many things I found there, this quote really hit me:
"There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception."
I didn't believe. And yet the coward in me was desperately trying to keep from a hell that I really didn't believe in, merely because it "might be possible".
But what if I lived all of my life in this superstitious way?
What if every time I spill salt, I shake some of it over my left shoulder just to be safe? What if I avoid cracks in the sidewalk just in case I possibly break my mother's back? What if I make certain not to break a mirror because I might get sick, or get insanely frightened by black cats?
What if, what if, what if, what if...
What if I stopped being afraid of the dark?
Now, I have to say that I'm no longer afraid of hell. The arguments for it and the evidence I have been given do not warrant a belief in it. And I'm done living a lie, acting as if I am a Christian when I truly am not.
So with one sweep, I have done away with what I believed, and have stepped into a world that is far more beautiful, strange, and crazy than I could have comprehended when I was a Christian. I have stepped into a world without god, without religion, without any holy texts or divine messages.
I can openly say that I am no longer afraid of the dark.
*Pascal himself didn't mention hell in his original "wager", but that is where many today (including myself at the time) take it.
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